Highlights
- We helped a leading UK-based water company reduce call centre volumes by driving an additional 8,446 visits to the website each month
- Customers are now more informed about the organisation as a result of consuming additional content at a rate of an additional 31,730 page views per month
- The newly designed site and user journeys are more engaging with bounce rates reducing by a third – the equivalent of an additional 2,500 engaged visits per month
Background
The organisation’s supply area is 322 square miles and they maintain over 2,000 miles of water mains, eight treatment works, 23 pumping stations and 31 operational service reservoirs and water towers.
Their business plan for 2020-2025 outlines how they aim to build on the improvements that they are continually making to their digital estate – including the biggest digital investment in their history – to offer a service that will see them equal to the leading providers of excellent customer service.
Business Drivers
Recognising that digital innovation is key to achieving great customer satisfaction scores, the organisation’s digital team knew that many customers value the flexibility of digital channels, as it enables them to manage their interactions with their supplier when it suits them best.
They have made substantial investments in their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, billing systems, the development of their customer service staff and their digital estate, with aims to improve their CSAT scores and to put their customers at the heart of their business.
Their main aims for the 2020-2025 period were to build on the great work they had already created through their digital estate and further invest in digital technology. Looking to develop on these innovations, they wanted to build out their digital offering and had aims to enhance their digital channels to create efficiencies for their customer service personnel and their customers, reducing customer contact centre volumes, increasing customer self-serve opportunities and creating seamless digital-first journeys for their customers.
Solution
To ensure that the water company were able to deliver new digital solutions that increased customer engagement and simplified the content management process, we re-platformed their website estate from a legacy CMS to the Sitecore DXP.
The initial site delivered on this platform focused on addressing key customer needs by significantly streamlining and overhauling the existing content and restructuring it into journeys that served customers better.
The Sitecore DXP solution is highly flexible, allowing it to scale in response to spikes in customer demand and simplifying processes for internal digital teams.
This makes it very easy for content editors to rapidly update content across multiple domains and ensure the contact centre is fully supported, especially during periods of high demand.
The new site has been built to be fully compliant and accessible, but to further improve experiences for vulnerable customers, we have also helped the organisation to integrate Recite Me into their digital estate. Recite Me is a cloud-based web accessibility solution which allows customers and clients who suffer from visual impairments, hearing loss and common learning disabilities to customise a website in a way that best suits their requirements.
Outcome
The water provider’s new digital estate is much easier for customers to navigate. We have created new routes to forms within the website that are easy to follow and are better signposted. Forms such as the ‘moving property form’ have experienced an increase in both traffic and completions, creating efficiencies for the customer and the organisation’s customer facing teams.
The organisation also utilise our 24/7/365 support service and have done since the outset of our working partnership. Our Managed Services solution has been a massive benefit for them, particularly at a time of crisis, like the outbreak of COVID-19, where their team has required new digital solutions to improve customer experiences for those who have been unable to get through to their customer contact centres.
We have worked closely with the organisation throughout the outbreak of COVID-19, helping them to pivot quickly to meet the changing requirements of their customers by implementing payment holiday forms, signposting priority services register sign-up pages and integrating a chatbot. This has improved the overall customer experience whilst simultaneously offering customers multiple methods of contacting their provider when the capacity of call centres were affected by the coronavirus.
In parallel to delivery of the initial site, we have been collaborating to develop the organisation’s roadmap with their digital team, working together on a fully integrated customer self-service portal, and to plan new innovations that will enhance the already great service that they continually endeavour to provide.
